Oberlin’s Food Isn’t “Cultural Appropriation.” That Doesn’t Mean the Students Are Wrong.

December 23, 2015

I recall my
first “Mexican night” dinner at a British university: boiled chicken breast
with a side of white rice topped with stewed tomatoes and seasoned with what
was probably cardamom. I suppose they could have called it “Mexican-inspired
masala-inspired British chicken,” so that none of us could mistake the dish for
“cultural appropriation,” but the truth is that a hard-working and
underappreciated dining staff were just trying to do something fun, new, and
inclusive. I suspect the dining vendor’s motivations were similar at Oberlin
College, where students are
calling flawed attempts at bánh mì and General Tso’s
chicken “cultural appropriation.”

Something
is indeed wrong here, but it’s not “cultural appropriation,” a term that
carries more meaning as a signal of media outrage than as a descriptor for
variegated forms of cultural borrowing or pilfering. When I talk with my
international students, one of the most frequent topics of conversation is how
difficult it can be to move to the U.S. from India, Pakistan, Vietnam, or Kenya
and get used to the food while acclimating in so many other ways. An
influential segment of the U.S. media loves a chance to call college students
needy and coddled, but the stakes of this issue are greater than dietary
preference: students who struggle to eat will struggle with health, and
students who struggle with health will struggle with classes.

Thus, it’s important
we acknowledge that if U.S. colleges and universities—particularly wealthy
ones—are going to tout our diverse, international communities and court the
best students from a global talent pool, we need to meet students’ enthusiasm
to study in the U.S. with support for the needs and customs they acquire within
their home cultures. To be clear, then, when Oberlin students take issue with
the dining vendor’s renderings of Vietnamese or Chinese dishes, they are
correct to understand this as a germane cultural issue, not just a “gripe” about lousy cafeteria food. The problem is
that calling this “appropriation” is not only inaccurate, but also detrimental
to the aims of anti-colonialism, of pushing back against cultural theft.

As an academic with
training in cultural studies, I’m willing to shoulder some of the blame for
this sort of confusion, but also to offer a solution. We teach students to
understand that, for example, when a white, Australian woman like Iggy Azalea
puts on a Southern U.S. patois and a “blaccent” as defining features of her music, while disrespecting the black cultural
tradition that’s made her stardom possible, there’s a useful distinction to be
made between cultural borrowing and outright theft. Making such distinctions is
almost never easy, but the value of doing so lies in the analysis itself, which
compels us to learn about the histories and contexts of different cultural
traditions, and thus to understand with greater nuance why some instances of
cultural blending or mixing strike us as innocuous if not wonderful while
others seem crass or exploitative.

As
others have pointed out, cultural
appropriation—adopting something from another cultural tradition for one’s own
use—is not always a bad thing. It would be difficult to imagine what music,
literature, science, and food would look like without people in one culture
consuming and reconfiguring elements of other cultures. It would be impossible
to imagine cross-cultural influences of all sorts without appropriation, from
American pizza to Japanese whisky to Latin American poetry. For this reason,
“cultural appropriation” is simply the wrong term for cultural theft, because
it betrays an important distinction. Incidental borrowing and sharing between
cultures is one thing, while using one’s relative power over another to steal,
degrade, or distort for the purpose of exploitation is another.

The case of
ciabatta-based bánh mì at Oberlin is a telling example. Making bánh mì with
ciabatta instead of baguette is blasphemous, because it was the French, not the
Italians, who colonized Vietnam from the 1870s to the 1950s. The Vietnamese
appropriated the French baguette, but made it with rice flour in addition to
wheat flour; then they added Vietnamese ingredients (cilantro, pickled carrots)
to the French-influenced sandwich along with pâté.

Thus, a bánh mì with the wrong
bread and a mayo-based coleslaw instead of fresh herbs and pickled vegetables is
no bánh mì at all, as Vietnamese students understand better than anyone. It is,
rather, an inaccurate rendering, a bad translation of a dish that was itself a
cultural appropriation of the most appropriate sort. Colonized groups are
forced to do what they can with the cultural raw materials foisted upon them by
colonizers, and the Vietnamese did this to create what is probably the world’s
most perfect sandwich.

But academics,
activists, and an outrage-driven media climate have failed students by using
“cultural appropriation” so broadly as to dilute its effectiveness as an
anti-colonialist term. Intuitive and intelligent students at Oberlin are
searching for language to describe their disappointment with institutional
choices to prize international students while accommodating them in name only,
but they’re working with confused terminology.

These mistakes tend to
happen when terminology moves from academic to popular discourse, which is why
it’s so important for academics to take some responsibility for what becomes of
our specialist language. For this reason I offer a clarification that I prefer
when teaching about hegemony and colonialism. In the case at Oberlin, “cultural
appropriation” would be the value-neutral practice of making a fusion dish that
draws from Vietnamese ingredients among others; “cultural expropriation” would
be making an authentic bánh mì and calling it the “Oberlin Sandwich,” without
attribution for the Vietnamese tradition from which it was pilfered; and
attempting to make a bánh mì without caring or understanding what that sandwich
requires—which is what actually happened at Oberlin—is indeed a form of
cultural insensitivity, but hardly a form of theft. If anything, the food
controversy at Oberlin is more about savvy students catching the dining vendor—not the kitchen staff—in a halfhearted attempt to do the right thing by making respectable
international dishes suitable for a diverse student body.

If we want fine
distinctions between concepts—and we should—we need fine distinctions in our
descriptive language. At this point, cultural appropriation is a meaningless
term that allows no differentiation between innocuous or incidental
appropriations and stealing. Cultural expropriation—stealing exploititavely
from a marginalized culture—is the term we should be using to describe things
like the Washington, D.C. professional football team,
the “ghetto fab” halloween costume,
or the performance style of Iggy Azalea (as opposed to the performance style of Eminem).
Removing the baggage of “appropriation” helps us focus more clearly on a real
problem at Oberlin: not that cultures are being stolen from or exploited
through food, but that the institution is not serious enough about providing
(and providing for) the cultural diversity it rightly values in its mission
statement.

Aaron R. Hanlon is Assistant Professor of English at Colby College and advisor for Georgetown University’s MLA/Mellon Foundation “Connected Academics” project.